Where was Adam Silver when the WNBA needed him?

Thank goodness the Dream forced a Game 7 in San Francisco.

Had the Valkyries won, the WNBA would have crowned a champion in its 30th season at 2 p.m. on a weekday.

That’s right, Game 6 was served up as a Thursday matinee because the Dream’s regular 3,500-seat arena couldn’t really fit a Finals game, and an NBA game was scheduled for State Farm Arena Thursday night.

To resolve the conflict, officials explored moving the dates and venues. Ultimately, they settled on the less-than-ideal solution of hosting a potential clincher before lunch.

Fans’ outrage prompted finger-pointing. The Dream said they’d raised concerns about the scheduling conflict with the WNBA for months but didn’t receive the proper attention or urgency.

“Perhaps, our place in the Finals was not accounted for,” the Dream’s ownership group huffed in an open letter to fans.

On the other hand, multiple reports say that already in December, the WNBA sent a memo to teams with the postseason dates, putting the onus on the teams to resolve any conflicts.

This happens in sports: The ball drops between two teammates, both having assumed the other would get it.

Sometimes it’s no big deal. You just move on to the next play.

But when these miscommunications reoccur, when they happen around the biggest game of the year, it usually signals a need for stronger leadership.

Hopefully that's coming. Hopefully whoever replaces retiring WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert will have the foresight to resolve these kinds of conflicts. However, that person will still report to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, and as usual, it’s not clear where he stood on all of this.

Watching this saga unfold, I thought back to a recent interview in The Athletic, where he defended the NBA’s control over the WNBA, saying that there are “enormous benefits to running integrated operations.”

Surely there’s truth to that.

But in moments like these, when a leader is needed to get NBA teams to be flexible and accommodate the WNBA Finals, isn’t that the exact kind of benefit integrated operations should offer?

Even if the ball dropping between the WNBA and the Dream put the NBA in an impossible position, how did Silver allow it to get to that point?

The NBA is an incredibly successful, 80-year-old league that should be advising on how to avoid situations like this.

I find Silver’s silence on all this very disappointing, if typical for the NBA. The league has never been forthcoming about how it runs its subsidiary, beyond the occasional reminder that they've kept it afloat financially.

That’s become increasingly grating as the WNBA goes mainstream. Even casual fans want to know how the league is run, and superfans want to properly allocate blame when things go wrong.

The good news? These Finals show that the WNBA is popular enough to withstand instances of mismanagement. TV viewership broke records, and every Finals game, including the one that started at 11:30 a.m., was packed to the brim.

Vibes have been immaculate. They should be even better next season.

The Dream are moving out of Gateway Center and into State Farm Arena permanently, leaving the Mystics as the only WNBA team playing in an arena with fewer than 10,000 seats.

Maybe in a few years, when every WNBA team has a proper home, fans will laugh about Game 6 being played during brunch. But the NBA’s half-baked stewardship will not be forgotten.